


clever things, a congregation

by freudiancascade



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gods & Goddesses, Gen, and by that i mean "morgan", drinking the Loving Rita Juice today, i guess self-indulgent lyrical nonsense prose is where i live now, morgan made me do it, the discord made me do it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-09-21 15:07:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17045966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/freudiancascade/pseuds/freudiancascade
Summary: See, that’s the trick to it. Rita is a greedy thing, and she knows it -- she is divinity, after all. She needs to be seen, to be loved, to be needed. And so sometimes, for Juno Steel, she pulls and pulses the last swirls of her magic, throws her weight against the scales of fate a little bit harder than she really should, and brings forth a miracle.





	clever things, a congregation

* * *

Humans are such clever things. Rita likes that about them, the way they build and grow and constantly change, constantly reinvent, perpetually recreate themselves anew.

And sure, it means that sometimes they leave behind things that would be best not forgotten, but when she looks at it all -- the vastness of humanity, the bulk of what they’ve created with their clever clever hands -- it’s hard to begrudge them too much for forgetting. They’re so fickle and fleet, after all. They flare brightly and they burn and then they fade, their lifespans passing in a blink of an eye, and that is the end of it. They keep with them what they can carry between generations, the stories and the pains and the faiths that are worth shouldering into the future, and they allow the rest to swirl into nothingness. It’s like staring into an ocean or, she imagines, it would be like that if this planet _had_ oceans. It has been a long time since she has seen a vastness of water, so she can not say for sure that she remembers them entirely accurately.

The point is, despite all her endlessness and love and noise, the humans forgot about her and she can not bring herself to hate them for it. There is no point in mourning what has long since past, and she has seen too many of her brothers and sisters burn themselves out in pursuit of a glorious history that has long since passed them by. Rita is not like that. Rita can create her own purpose, build her own self up, and find joy wherever the currents of time take her. This planet she has inherited may not be the one she has left behind, but it still has more than enough spots of brightness to keep her content. Computers that whizz and hum and speak in an arithmetic that is a magic in and of itself; candies wrapped in brightly colored papers; small animals whose genetic codes have been twisted and warped and yet oh, they love all the same; blue sunsets; humans who wander with open hearts and kind eyes and who tell stories to each other in the same way they always did. Even if the mediums are always changing -- now the stories stream outwards from the point of origin like infinite eddies pouring from a thousand rivers -- Rita can't get enough of them. Her existence on Mars is a swirl of color and movement and life, and she moves through it all gladly.

She’s always had a soft spot for a lost cause, anyways, and this entire planet screams songs of desperation into her dreaming every time she closes her eyes and tries to feel the pull of it. It is a desert, it is burning, it is irradiated and scarred, and yet it sustains life anyways because it is too stubborn to know when to stop. Rita likes that about it. She has always held herself aloft behind the prayers and hopes and fervent dreams of those who persist.

Besides, there is a single human left who has faith in her powers, and she has made the unshakeable decision to be content with her congregation of one.

That human is a difficult case, which helps matters -- he is bright and interesting, and he carries his city on his shoulders as though it were his own solitary burden to bear, and he is absolutely a lost cause. He does not walk the world searching for a god, and she suspects he would violently reject any that would go so far as to prove itself to him. Fair enough, and the prayers he refuses to allow himself to say are beyond her scope to answer, anyways. What he does need is a friend, and this is something Rita can be perfectly well. He believes in her fiercely enough to almost make up for all that the years have taken from her, and she would do just about anything to help him in return.

See, that’s the trick to it. Rita is a greedy thing, and she knows it -- she is divinity, after all. She needs to be seen, to be loved, to be needed. And so sometimes, for Juno Steel, she pulls and pulses the last swirls of her magic, throws her weight against the scales of fate a little bit harder than she really should, and brings forth a miracle. Maybe a lost object is found right in the nick of time. Maybe a door opens when it should, by all rights, remain closed. Maybe a truth is known, and it sings like the first break of sunrise over the curve of the dome that protects them from the sky.

Rita can do these things for him, and so she does.

* * *

There are humans who draw the divine to them like moths to open flame, and Rita is unsure which element of the equation Juno Steel is -- the candle, or the gossamer that throws itself bright against it. He has that way about him, and so he might be both.

When another one of her kind arrives and is enraptured by him, she is unsurprised. Unhappy, but unsurprised.

This interloper is a quick and changeable wisp of a thing. He is sharp around the edges, and much too clever for anybody’s good. She suspects he hasn’t nurtured a steady faith in a very long time, as he takes worship where he can get it -- tricking humans into following him just long enough, building adoration and love in an impossible calculus, and then vanishing into thin air and stealing it away to wherever the solar winds blow him next.

Rita immediately dislikes this thief, and knows that this will end badly.

* * *

It does end badly.

When Juno Steel returns to her, he is broken in new ways. He no longer prays with those half-formed hopes and sideways wishes; he no longer has that steadfast surety that Rita will not let him down.

Rita has sung circles around faith for long enough to know that this is not her fault, and so she bides her time and waits. A good god knows how to do that, more than anything else: weather the moods and storms of mortals, hold tight and allow them to steer their own way back to shore. And her congregation-of-one has moods to spare, these days.

Well. It is rather a lot to be dealing with. Perhaps -- by the best of metrics -- she is not _good_. Patience has never been entirely her strong suit and she has been known, on occasion, to meddle.

(Fine. Perhaps she meddles more frequently than that, but it is only because she knows what would be best. She knows how to spare months -- years -- oceans of human pain, and could not stand the weight of it if she chose not to act.)

Rita knows only one thing will have the ability to fully repair what has been broken in Juno Steel, and she does not have to search hard to find him.

Hundreds of years ago, a young thief surrendered his name onto a bloody altar for the sake of a people who desperately needed something to believe in. In return he was given eternity, for as long as that name remained alive in their memories.

On Brahma, Peter Nureyev is still the object of songs and prayers. Children skip rope and sing the name into their rhymes, weaving circles of power and belief. Travellers carry coins in their pockets, silver circles embossed with a knife on one side and an angel on the other. He is their protector, and perhaps he always will be.

Rita realizes, with a pang of sympathy, that he had not meant to become this. And that, by the time he realized what he had done, it would have been far too late to take it back.

It is no surprise, then, that Peter Nureyev still runs. He is bound by his name to an existence he'd never have chosen, and it must be a heavy burden. All these years and all this distance later, he has still not found a safe place to stop and set it down.

Or, rather, he had. And then Juno Steel had rejected his promise of a different kind of forever, just as Rita could have told Peter he would.

Rita decides she does not dislike the thief quite as intensely as she did before. Peter Nureyev is still young, and so of course he is still careless in his dealings with mortals. He had not meant to do harm -- he had fallen in love, and harm had been done all the same.

That is an ancient story, one almost as old as Rita herself. She hums softly, slightly off-key, and allows herself to ache for them both.

* * *

Everything moves in a circle eventually.

She’ll have _words_ for Peter Nureyev when he returns (and oh, she is certain he will return). He is still young, in the grand scheme of things. He is still all bound in pretense and the thrill of having pulled one over on death itself; he is still too quick and too sharp, and he is still capable of being cut against his own edges. Rita has no need for pretense, herself -- she is who she is, and she will weather whatever comes next with a smile.

Hyperion City is in need of a protector. She’s known that for some time. But the need has been growing keener, lately, the bubble preparing to burst. Juno Steel has always been on the cusp of reaching out too far past himself, balanced on the knife’s edge between his own fragile humanity and the vast impossible calling of something so much _larger_ than any mortal being could hold. He looks to the stars and he holds his breath, and they wait to see if he will transcend.

Rita has never been one to fret, though now she wonders more than ever what the future will bring. Perhaps Juno Steel is neither the moth nor the flame; perhaps he will light a candle all his own in the dark.

She hopes she will be there when he does.

He has faith in her. More to the point, he is her friend, and so it does not matter if he is a lost cause. Those, after all, are the stories humanity tells best, over and over again. Triumph, when all seems lost. Something small throwing themselves fully against the hurricane, and finding themselves triumphant in the eye of the storm. It’s in every one of the streams she devours like the oxygen her body doesn’t truly need; sometimes she thinks the stories, more than anything else, are the things that keep her alive.

She may have been forgotten once, and she likely will be again. But as long as she has a friend, for now, Rita is content. She will keep working her small miracles and impossible magics, allowing herself to drift in on the current of time.

Always, things come back around.

**Author's Note:**

> Blame @murmuredlullabye for this! They instigated, and did a wonderful beta read. 
> 
> (and also blame the Penumbra mini-bang discord server, which is full of enablers)


End file.
